Retired Col. Rob Maness | Area 51, 9/11, January 6, And Liberty In America | OAP #37
During his military service, Colonel Maness led numerous combat operations, including as a bomber squadron commander in Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. Colonel Maness served as an enlisted bomb disposal technician in three assignments countering terrorism before being commissioned and selected for flight training. As a Joint Chiefs of Staff operations officer he was on duty in the National Military Command Center located within the Pentagon during the September 11, 2001 attack. In the ensuing months, he directly assisted the United States national security team with creating, synchronizing, and executing the campaign plan for the global war on terrorism. Colonel Maness authored the first theater nuclear war plan and designed decision-making tools for the Presidential nuclear decision handbook strengthening U.S. extended strategic deterrence policy in European and Pacific regions. Colonel Maness served as the Vice Commander of America’s largest Airborne Intelligence Wing conducting strategic and battlefield intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations against America’s enemies. He went on to command Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, NM, the sixth largest U.S. Air Force Base encompassing 53,000 acres and 22,000 employees, housing our nation’s most critical assets.
After running for the U.S. Senate, Rob founded GatorPAC, a Federal political action committee. The PAC educates grass roots political activists on the most effective ways to influence their elected officials, get a candidate elected, or to fight for a cause. It advocates for policies that protect your liberty, fight for limited government, and ensure prosperity. He is also a founding board member at the Military Advocacy Project of Louisiana, Inc., a veteran’s advocacy group committed to preventing veteran suicides and ensuring military families have equal access to benefits. He has served as a non-voting board member of the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce and Hispano Chamber of Commerce in his role as Commander of Kirtland AFB. As president of his local chapter of the Military Officers Association of America, he led a team that created an annual scholarship fund for graduating high school students. Rob is a Life Member of the NRA, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, and the Military Officers Association of America. He is also a member of the Louisiana Military Order of Foreign Wars and the Society of the Sons of the Revolution. Active in the community, Rob served as an elected member of the Republican Party Executive Committee representing St. Tammany Parish Council District 1 for two terms and served on the board of the only Republican Men’s Club in Louisiana.
I'm not as nimble as you at the Twitter, so I'm trying to tweet out the show link.
That's okay, man.
I should have sent you a little bit of a title.
Say your handle.
Say your handle.
Is that real Chase Geyser?
Yeah, yeah, you can see it at the bottom of the screen.
Yeah, I got it.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate you.
Oh, yeah.
Hey, I'm honored that you would ask me.
Man, I got to talk to this guy.
What do you want to talk about, brother?
Man, I want to talk about.
Let me just pull up your bio.
I want to talk about your 32 years in the United States Air Force as a combat vet.
I want to talk about what it means to be a wing commander for nuclear ops.
And I want to know about, I want to hear the story about what it was like on 9-11 as a Pentagon survivor.
I mean, your whole life's been an adventure.
If Homer were around today, he would have added you to the Odyssey.
Yeah, the bio doesn't even talk about my childhood.
My dad was in the Air Force, and he worked up until I was about 12, I think.
And he worked in what's called black programs today.
Back in those days, they cut him loose officially from the Air Force and signed a contract with another organization that is called the Company.
And they would send him all over the world working for the company and civilian clothes and everything, taking care of U-2 airplanes, spy planes at the time, and SRC.
What years would that have been that he would have served then?
He started in the early 50s and retired, I think, in 1973.
But he drug us all around the earth too, including one tour up at a place called Dreamland.
Area 51 is what civilians refer to that area as.
And we didn't live there, but he worked up there.
We lived out in Las Vegas.
Was he a believer?
Not necessarily in Area 51, but just generally.
Was he a believer?
He never spoke.
I'm not a Fed, I promise.
My dad never spoke specifics to me about what he did, but he had a book signed by the author.
The title of the book is called Operation Overflight.
And the author's name is Francis Gary Powers.
You may recognize the name.
Most people today probably don't.
He was the U-2 pilot that was shot down over the Soviet Union and then put on trial and all that.
Gary Powers, my dad worked in that unit with him.
And all the guys that supported Powers got a book signed by him.
And my dad left me that in his will.
So that's the only thing specific that he ever said because he was under very big non-disclosure agreements all of his life until the day that Operation Overflight is about the story of the U-2 and how President Eisenhower and the place called the Skunk Works got started.
The Skunk Works is out of Palmdale, California.
It's where they built the U-2, the SR-71, and all these other great technologies that you see flying around courtesy to the United States of America these days.
And it tells that story and power story about getting shot down, what his experiences were in a Soviet prison as a political prisoner, the show trials, and those kind of things.
So people ought to read the book today because you'll see some similarities in the show trial part about what's happening with the political prisoners from January 6, 2021 in the United States.
And I'm not being funny.
I'm very, very upset to have to say that with a serious face because what's going on in our country is not right.
A lot of us have sacrificed our lives.
And my friends, matter of fact, I'm co-authoring a book about a guy that I used to work for that died in an aircraft crash.
I spoke to his widow today, as a matter of fact, to talk about the book.
And people have sacrificed too much for this bullshit to go on.
Yeah.
How many is it that have been in prison since January 6th?
It's upwards of 50%.
I think it's a little over 500.
And what's really troubling is that some of them have not been charged with any.
Matter of fact, most of them have not been charged with any violent crimes and they've been held without bail and solitary confinement in places like the DC jail.
And we're getting some strange stories from family members from the prisoners where they're getting abused and those kind of things.
And that's never stuff like that.
That threats to put them in general population with the hardcore criminals, those kind of things.
These are people like you and me, really.
Honestly, right.
Well, so what do you, what are your thoughts then about what happened on January 6th?
Because, you know, you may be more well-versed in it than I am, having spoken to these families, but my sort of take on what happened is that it was just, you know, obviously there was some FBI involvement.
We know that from the reporting that's just come out.
But it seems to me that it was just some enthusiastic protesters that got a little carried away.
Definitely, there were some laws that were broken, it seems.
But, you know, this notion of arresting people for walking in if they're being let in, which at some entrances, they obviously were being let in.
And you see the security footage of them staying within the velvet ropes.
And it's like, all right, do we really need to, you know, have these people locked up for six months before a trial?
Like, they're not, they're not a flight risk.
There was definitely some riot activity, no doubt about it.
But I think overall, the patriotic Americans that were there to first support the president at his speech and then the ones that did go up there and got it, either got enticed to go inside, were let in by the police force or whatever, or encouraged by provocateurs.
And we know one Antifa BLM provocateur was there.
We have him on video encouraging people to break into the Capitol.
His name is John Earl Sullivan.
I reported on it.
A shot, right?
He was right there.
A young guy, a young independent reporter named Taylor Hansen, was standing right there.
I've had Taylor on my show.
You can go back and find that episode.
It's a very compelling story.
He was standing right there with, you know, next to Sullivan and Babbitt when she was killed.
So, you know, it's to get back to your question, though, what do I think?
What I think was there was definitely a riot there.
I don't think there was any intent to riot on the part of the folks that are being charged with like conspiracy.
And it's definitely not an insurrection.
No one's been charged with sedition or insurrection at all.
Most people, like I said, most of the 500 or so have not been charged with anything violent.
They're mostly misdemeanors, some minor felonies, those kind of things.
And it's just appalling that we're holding political prisoners.
And we shouldn't be doing that in this country, especially at the same time when we need that credibility to be calling out the communist government in Cuba for arresting its protesters that really are yearning to be free.
But we don't have the credibility that we used to have because we're doing the same thing.
We really are doing the same thing.
That's what the intent of the response is to chill the patriotic Americans to keep us from speaking out and opposing the regime, which many people believe is illegitimate.
And there are some good facts and data that support that opinion and support that view.
But the regime media, and I call it the regime media like a couple other folks do, because that's really the best description of it.
The regime media like CNN and even Fox News in many cases continues to say it was an insurrection.
They continue to say that five people died due to the insurrection.
Only person that died was the murder of Ashley Babbitt by a Capitol police officer.
I think his last name is Bird.
And I don't know why the FBI investigation cleared him because I was a, you mentioned I was a wing commander for my last assignment and a vice wing commander two assignments before that.
So I've run operational wings and been responsible for large law enforcement operations, over 450 people.
My last one was four security force squadrons.
So I've had my own jails and those kind of things.
And your rules of engagement and policy for use of lethal force, even on a U.S. military base, are very well defined.
And there's a very well-defined set of conditions that we make our folks and train our folks to respond with deadly force like that.
And I know of no rule of engagement or policy in the Capitol security business that says that you shoot an unarmed protester just because they're coming through a broken window and a door into a certain location.
There are no locations inside the Capitol that I'm aware of that allow for the use of deadly force for an unarmed protester wrapped in an American.
Do you think the man that shot her was just spooked and made a bad call?
I don't know, but he made a bad call.
And that's why I question why the FBI has clear to him that he didn't make a bad call.
He definitely made a bad call.
She was unarmed.
There were four tactical police team members within arm's reach of her.
He was not communicating.
As far as I know, we don't know.
Actually, it doesn't look like he was communicating.
And he just decided he was going to shoot her and stop what was going on right there.
That's just not the way we're supposed to do things in the United States of America.
That's what happens in Cuba, you know, China, those kind of places.
So, what do you think the, what do you think the ultimate outcome of all this January 6th stuff is going to be?
I mean, you just think that these 500 people are going to be charged due time, you know, several months or eight.
I know that one of the first convictions was eight months for gentlemen that was there.
Yeah, I hope that case goes to the Supreme Court under the inhumane punishment because it was hopefully don't wait eight months to hear it.
Well, you know, he'll probably, he'll probably serve the time.
But, you know, we have this thing in the United States of America, and it's codified in the Constitution now after the Civil War and slavery was abolished.
It's called equal treatment under the law.
And in this country, what I'm concerned about will be the final outcome of this incident is that the narrative of the insurrection will be used to develop a war plan to go against domestic terrorists.
But the definition of those domestic terrorists and extremists under, in this case, the Biden administration is going to be their political opponents that are very outspoken like me and other folks.
And you see that when they got the first opportunity to go after folks, they're going after them full board.
The DOJ is very, very upfront about that.
And the prosecuting attorneys are very upfront about it.
They called it shock and awe.
Well, you know, that's one thing to try to make sure we have a stable society and everything.
But we have a right to abolish this government if they're not doing their job.
And their job is to protect our freedom.
It's right there in the Declaration of Independence that created the United States of America.
And we have a right to abolish this government.
We have a right to go protest.
And we have a right to peacefully assemble and air our grievances to the United States of America.
And that includes that Capitol building.
And shame on Nancy Pelosi and the Department of Defense for making a fortress out of that place for no reason because they had no intelligence to support that.
So that's what I'm concerned about: we will have an unequal justice system as the outcome of this.
And you're seeing it develop right now with the first sentence, eight months for this for a guy that walked into the building, for goodness sake.
There was no negative, no, no previous history of a crime, no violence involved in the criminal charges that were put on the guy.
And he was kept in solitary confinement.
That's how they probably got the guilty plea out of him.
The Tucker segment last night with Mark, I think, Ibrahim or Ibrahim.
I don't know how to pronounce it.
But he's being charged.
And one of the charges is leaning on a monument.
And I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, who the hell got charged with leaning on a monument for burning down the guard house of the White House or all the other vandalism that we saw throughout BLM throughout in George Floyd Protocol?
You remember early June?
You remember early June when the White House was attacked so aggressively that the Secret Service moved the president to the bunker below the White House?
Do you know how unusual?
Yeah, you know how unusual of a step that is?
Look, you mentioned Mike.
Was anyone charged?
No, no one was charged.
Not that I'm aware of.
No one was charged.
That was an insurrection.
That was an insurrection.
And there were firebombs found amongst the crowd.
So that was an armed with real weapons, not just flagpoles and sticks and those kind of things, which is what Nancy Pelosi and her minions keep saying were the weapons were flagpoles with the American flag on them.
But to get back to the president, you know, I worked in nuclear operations as a wing commander too, but as a major, I worked.
Well, it was in my wing command job ended in when I retired in 2011.
So we're not talking that long ago.
We still have lots of nuclear weapons and a nuclear mission and those kind of things.
But before that, in 2099 to 2002, I worked on the joint staff in the Pentagon working for the chairman.
You know who the chairman is now, Crazy Billy, who we can talk about too.
I've got a video editorial going out tonight again about him and what he calls white rage.
I'm curious as to what the heck that is.
Any angry white person?
Well, but as part of my job, I worked in nuclear operations on the joint staff.
Our job was to maintain what's called the Black Book.
The official name for it is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Nuclear Decision Handbook, which is what's in the football that makes the president the commander in chief of a nuclear force.
Okay, it's the nucleus, it's called the Blackbook, and uh, you know, uh, our team, the team that I was part of, uh, was responsible for writing plans into the book, taking them out, maintaining it, making sure the operational forces were ready to go.
You know, we were responsible for all that, so I know how important it is when they move the president of the United States to the bunker.
That's a major move, and the secret service was very, very concerned.
And nobody was charged with sedition or insurrection.
Matter of fact, nobody was charged with anything, maybe it wasn't nice.
I mean, do they have like take five bars down there and like hot towels?
Government housing is not nice.
Wow.
So Trump must have been really pissed because he's accustomed to like gold-plated toys.
Well, I haven't been there since he I've been to the White House when he was in the White House.
I did have a meeting in there once, and it was nice, but it's still a government building.
Did you meet the president?
I've met the president a couple of times.
Yeah.
What was it like to meet him?
He's an interesting guy.
Interesting guy.
Yeah.
I'm not asking for like an endorsement or a condemnation.
I just like it for like as a human being.
Like, what is it like to meet somebody that you know is you know, like the most power, one of the most powerful people in the world?
Yes.
I've had, you know, I mean, the last time I met him, he was very gracious and kind and those kinds of things.
You know, if I had one critique for the president, I've said it openly many, many times, is personnel is policy, Mr. President.
And if you ever get back in, please put America first, loyal patriots to the Constitution on your staff instead of people that are devoted to big government.
Because there's a difference between being devoted to big government, even if you've worn the uniform all your life.
If you're devoted to big government, then that's why you see some of the problems that he had with personnel and leaks and those kind of things.
All of that was related to his personnel policies.
And, you know, some people that are closer to much closer to him than I am don't think they were listened to very well.
And that's what I would say to him.
But I think his policies were right on.
I ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014.
And if I had known the phrase America first was going to be used by him, I'd have used it too, because the policies I've run on were the same ones that he won on in 2016 and I ran in 2014 in Louisiana against Marylander and Bill Cassidy, the Republican that won that eventually voted to convict Donald Trump last January, unfortunately.
Sounds like it's time for him to go on again.
Well, you know what?
As Jesse, you know who Jesse Kelly is?
Yeah, I do.
I remember that.
On the first, right.
As Jesse Kelly has said, he ran for Congress.
He said, clearly, I am out of step with the voters.
And as long as that condition, yeah, and he is.
And I believe I was too, because I was running on America First.
And until the voters are ready to fully embrace America First, I can't run for office again.
But we're here and we will keep holding especially the right accountable for their major scripts, which they tend to do every single day.
Yeah.
So I have to ask you a question just sort of as a tangent.
I didn't want to interrupt you earlier when you were talking about nuclear command.
But you remember in 2016, one of the big campaign criticisms of Donald Trump is just the Clinton campaign was constantly like, can you imagine someone as reckless and unpredictable as Donald Trump having the nuclear codes?
And my question to you is, is it really that easy for the president to just drop a nuke?
Can the president just be like, hey, we need to right now, Iran right now, and just do it?
Like, is that how that works?
Well, he's got to give the order and the order comes through.
Yeah.
But can he make the order control system that includes the codes that he carries in his pocket on his right?
Right.
But can he can he make the order without like anybody, any consensus?
Can he just unilaterally say we're nuke and Iran right now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Congress gave him that authority during the Cold War and it's never been it's never been changed.
That's the problem with old policy.
You know, you know, what about the understate?
Could he nuke Austin, Texas if he wanted to?
Seriously.
I know it's not.
The president of the United States has total control over the nuclear forces of the United States.
We have one person of destroying the entire planet.
Like basically, but the nukes would have to be retargeted to do something like attack a target within the United States.
But it's not impossible.
It's not impossible.
But there was a whole lot of links in that chain that would have to stay together for him to be able to successfully do that.
And we have a nuclear command and control system that, yes, the president has the codes and the military aid that is with him has all that information with him all the time and walks him through that.
And we train him and the vice president, anybody else that has a black book aid, there's not just one.
Because, you know, what if the president died and the vice president was somewhere else, like it's happened several times where they've been separated and were under attack.
You know, so they have a like the vice president has a military aid and several others too that we won't go into here.
But it meets the succession requirements in the Constitution and the law.
Anyway, yeah, it's possible, but it's very, very unlikely that somebody could pull that off.
I'm much more uncomfortable with Joe Biden having the nuclear keys, so to speak, because if you watch his town hall the other night, sometimes the man can't put a sentence together.
And I don't know if that's his stutter.
I'm not making fun of him.
I'm deadly serious.
It's not his stutter because he had decades of speeches when he was a senator that were totally coherent.
I know.
He was totally coherent 10 years ago, even.
But I don't know.
But I don't know that for absolute sure.
So I'm not a doctor, but he scares the heck out of me as somebody that used to be involved in the nuclear command and control process at the highest level and making sure that it could go off precisely, accurately, and effectively and reliably at a moment's notice when the man can't talk.
And if he were to, I mean, we're in more danger now than of an accidental nuclear strike inappropriately applied or an accidental military strike inappropriately and incorrectly applied because of what comes out of the man's mouth than anything else.
And that's, I'm concerned about it.
I genuinely be able to mitigate that.
Well, the military aides are trained to help, but it's still the president of the United States is the commander in chief of the armed forces.
And when folks are under stress, you tend to go to your training.
And your training when you're in uniform is to follow the command orders of the commander-in-chief.
Even if you have a question, you should probably follow him and then ask the question later if it's a time-sensitive challenge that we're facing.
But, you know, it's concerning.
It's concerning.
Because it's not his stutter.
I've been watching Joe Biden and all those senator guys for a long time.
And he's out.
He's mentally out.
I don't know where he's at, but he's been at.
Yeah, that's sad.
That's sad.
You know, like I've never been a Joe Biden fan ever since I've known who he was.
So I really started paying attention to politics maybe right after I graduated high school 2010.
Yeah.
I've got a friend that worked on his Senate staff.
Very nice guy.
Now, don't hate me, but the guy used to be a Democrat.
I don't hate you.
We both don't like our political parties.
That's how I became friends with this gentleman.
And he worked on Mr. Biden's staff.
He said that Mr. Biden has always been a gentleman to him and was a very nice guy.
I interacted with him twice as vice president.
He was always a gentleman.
And the second time I interacted with him, I took him down a rope line of folks.
He didn't do or say anything weird or untoward.
He was very nice and gentlemanly and genuine, you know, genuinely interested in the folks that he was meeting and those kind of things.
So, you know, I can't say that I don't know him.
I haven't interacted with him.
So I think he's like as a human being, I understand where he's coming from, although I vehemently disagree with, I think, almost every single policy the man is implementing now.
There may be some that I can agree with, but well, like the Afghanistan withdrawal, I definitely agree with that.
I don't like the way it's being handled, but I've been pushing for that for a long time.
Well, you know, I'm not as knowledgeable about our international affairs as you are, and certainly not military stuff.
But my intuition is that if we're going to do these wars, we should do them quickly and win thoroughly.
And if we can't do that, then we shouldn't do it at all.
Well, you mentioned that I was an opinion.
It's expensive to be there for 20 years.
You mentioned that I was an opinion.
You mentioned I was in the Pentagon on 9-11.
So this is a good opportunity to segue into that discussion.
A lot of people forget these days when we're having the debates about military troops being used in combat and peacetime, really around the world That with Afghanistan, we were attacked by the al-Qaeda terrorist organization that was given sanctuary by the Taliban, who were the government of Afghanistan at the time.
So when we responded militarily, that part I could agree with after 9-11.
I was in the Pentagon on 9-11.
There is nothing like being in what you think is the world's most powerful, impenetrable military headquarters of the most powerful armed force in the history of mankind and then come under attack like we were.
And it was a strategic attack.
I mean, they turned those airplanes into cruise missiles is what they did.
And so, and I also was on the side of the building where Secretary Rumsfeld was, but I was internal.
His office was on the outside ring, so he got knocked out of his chair.
But I was two rings in in the C ring.
So he's in the E ring.
I was in the city.
Did you feel the floor shake and hear the loud noise and everything?
No, my office was inside what's called the National Military Command Center.
At the time, it was the only place where you had to go through a guard to get into.
That's totally different now.
But all we got was a whoosh through the environmental control system.
And then the asbestos-laden smoke came rushing in.
That's when we knew that we'd been struck by something.
Sorry you had to experience that.
Well, you know, I'm paid to do that.
My wife and kids, though, and the family members of folks that were there and the kids at the daycare center right in the Pentagon parking lot, they're not paid to do that.
Those are the ones that I, it just, it still to this day hurts my heart that our families had to go through that kind of thing right here in the heart of the United States of America.
And we spent all this blood, treasure, time, resources to have a strong armed force.
And then we flub it because of an intelligence failure by the FBI, which I believe is now that I know what I know about January 6th and the Witner thing.
I was suspecting it, but now I'm pretty sure they are a terrorist organization that are very similar to what used to be called the East German Stasi, which was the East German version of the Gestapo.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's that's hard for me to say because I know people that work in the FBI.
Yeah.
Well, I know good people that work in the FBI or have worked in the FBI.
So, you know, it's just one of those things.
It's like it's not everybody within an organization is responsible for the sins of that organization, but there is a point where you have to draw a line and say, all right, am I willing to be a part of this?
And, you know, I've got mixed feelings about Snowden, too.
I've talked to a lot of people I respect, you know, who say that what he did was reckless and, you know, it revealed our agents.
And then there's other people that are like, well, you know, the guy's kind of a hero because he showed America that they're being spied on, even though America didn't seem to care at all.
So, well, let's go to that for a second.
They revealed our agents.
You ever heard of a guy named John Brennan?
Yes.
Former CIA director, right?
Well, before he was the CIA director, he was in charge of our human intelligence network in China, in a place called China.
And under his direction, every one of our agents in China got rolled up and executed by the Chinese communists over there.
So totally unaware.
I didn't know that.
Talk about losses of a human intelligence network.
That was, I want to say, in the 2000s, early 2000s, maybe late 90s, those kind of things.
But we lost our entire human intelligence network in China.
That's one of the reasons why we don't have good information coming out of it is because they rolled them up.
And John Brennan was the guy in charge of making sure that network was secure at the time.
So you can say what you want about Snowden.
I got, you know, my national security heart goes, damn it, why did he do that?
But my American citizen, liberty-loving, you know, person who is the eighth-generation grandson of a guy that walked out of his county and volunteered for the Continental Army goes, man, this whole thing's always supposed to have been about liberty.
And we even wrote it in the Constitution that my information, my data, my papers, whatever words they used then, it's my data.
It's safe and secure without a warrant, you know, unless there's a warrant issued under probable cause.
And we're violating that every single day.
And I kind of appreciate Snowden for bringing that to light.
What I don't understand is why we don't have a good classified sector of classified information, whistleblower conduit that's secure enough to keep people like him safe.
You know, you saw a little bit of how the politicians use the whistleblower concept to keep people safe that they say are whistleblowers.
Well, we should have as good a system in the classified world of classified information as we do in the outside world, the non-classified information world.
And we don't.
And that's why I suspect that he did what he did because he really didn't have any other recourse as a contractor if he was going to reliably get the information out so it could be seen.
And I'm very appreciative that we now know this because I was floored.
I really was.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it was funny because, you know, there was this recent controversy of Tucker Carlson's emails allegedly being, you know, monitored by the NSA.
I'm like, Edward Snowden said that all of our emails are being monitored like 10 years ago and our webcams.
So it's like, of course, of course, Tucker Carlson's information is like, I don't know, actively being monitored by a human being, but it's definitely being captured and recorded.
So it's like, well, we're just going to.
There's no doubt about it.
Yeah, this will be captured and recorded.
And there's a data center out in Utah that's fairly new that's where it's going to be housed.
I'll tell you where it's housed.
A friend of mine, Chris Stewart's, the congressman out there, and he fought to get that built in his district back before when things were semi-normal, you know, and that's what congress people did instead of having to worry about your basic freedom every day.
But now, because of that, you know, just assume that anytime you're on a phone on a recording on the internet, that it's all being, you just got to assume it's all being recorded.
And quite frankly, I've been assuming that since I heard about Snowden for years.
So, you know, and occasionally I'll even put a note or a clarification on some things that I tweet or post.
Yeah.
Hey, NSA, hey, NSA, this is, I'm being rhetorical here tiberbo.
If you want your government to listen to you, just email Tucker Carlson.
Yeah, well, here's the problem with what happened with Tucker.
And this is not new either.
James Rosenberg, several other reports under the Obama administration, a lot of folks have been treated this way.
And the problem with what happened with Tucker is that, you know, they got Congress to agree to this stuff under the Patriot Act because they said, we have these rules.
You know, and one of those rules is the unmasking rule for, because this is all related to the foreign intelligence surveillance system.
You've heard it called the FISA warrant or the FISA court, secret court, those kind of things.
It's all related to that.
And if you're an American citizen, you're supposed to be remained masked if you're in a conversation.
Like he was in conversation.
Somebody on his team was in conversations, if not him directly, probably him directly, knowing him.
He does things on his own, trying to get Putin on his show.
Hey, if I had a show like Tucker Carlson, I'd be trying to get Putin on my show, but I can't even.
Yeah, I've been trying to get Putin on my show.
I can't get the phone numbers.
Anyway, so I downloaded Duolingo so I could talk.
It's no surprise at all that he was collected on.
What's the illegal piece of it is somebody unmasked him with the intention, according to his source, who, you know, is likely reliable.
The source saw the email traffic within the system where they unmasked him and said, we're going to get this guy.
That's the illegal part.
This is not the KGB.
It's not the Stasi.
It's not Communist Cuba or Venezuela.
This is the United States of America.
And that's why I've run on and I will continue to advocate for the repeal of the Patriot Act, while it may have been necessary initially.
At the time?
No, I was in the military, so I wasn't advocating or anything.
I was just focused on finding out who attacked us and going.
I understand, but were you, were you, did you have personal favorable sentiments toward the Patriot Act at the time?
I think it was, was it 2004 when that was passed?
I can't remember.
Well, no, it was 2001.
It was short-lived.
It was right after 9-11.
So the passions were high and concern was high, too.
And after the attack, I got put into a small team helping plan the war and find out who did this and those kind of things.
So I was very close to it.
And no, I don't like the Patriot Act.
I have never liked the Patriot Act.
Had I been public at the time, I would have been raising major concerns about the Patriot Act.
And since I've been out of the military and run for office, each time I've run for office, even at the state level, repealing the Patriot Act as soon as possible is one of my platform pillars.
Has to be.
Has to be.
It's wrong.
How does nobody tries to repeal it?
Is there ever a repeal bill brought forth?
Does like it's not a problem?
Tom Massey, Thomas Massey from Kentucky.
I think he's tried it.
Justin Amash.
You know, it's just, unfortunately for us regular citizens, the Republican Party has this misguided notion that supporting this stuff is important for the national security of the United States.
Well, I'm here to tell you that you are, you in the government, you are radicalizing patriots.
I think the sixth thing what you saw come out there just a little bit is that radicalization starting to show itself.
And I'm not talking about radicalizing as in being Nazis or socialists or any of that.
Those are already radicalized, by the way, by the left in this country.
I'm talking about people that believe in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution.
They are becoming radicalized because they see that the people that we've elected in office are not doing their job.
And there's one job.
There's uno numero job of a U.S. congressman or elected official is to protect our liberty.
It's right in the Constitution of the United States.
It's laid out as our values in the Declaration of Independence.
And when that government stops doing that job, we have an inherent and inalienable right to abolish it and reform another government.
And that is what is going on.
That's the kind of radicalization that I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about going out and going to war.
I'm talking about through the legal channels, it is time to abolish the current government in the United States.
The unelected portion of it is out of control.
That's what we're talking about with the FISA issue.
But it's Congress and the executive branch that have allowed that and the judicial branch.
The judicial branch, a lot of people forget that they allowed all this Russian FISA crap to happen.
And then when they discovered it, they didn't take any action to fix it and hold somebody accountable.
Not one person except for that one young attorney who didn't even get any jail time for faking the email saying that Carter Page was not an asset when he was.
They're taking away Rudy Giuliani's license to practice law.
And then they're not charging.
Yeah, that guy still got it.
That's really lies on a Pfizer warrant.
Unbelievable.
That guy's still got his license.
And that's the kind of shit that radicalizes people.
That's the kind of shit that radicalizes people.
Sorry for my language, but that's.
No, but it's important.
Well, you know, I spent all my life in the military and was raised by my dad was a sergeant and a bunch of other sergeants.
I was enlisted at 17.
So I have dads that were Air Force dads that were sergeants.
So you may hear profanity come out of my mouth on occasion when I get pissed off.
I have to ask you.
Have you ever seen any of the space program people?
Because that was all really happening when your dad was working, right?
Well, when my dad was working, his job after the one at Dreamland, Area 51, was in the deserts of Southern California, in the Mojave Desert.
You know what's in the Mojave Desert, right?
Edwards Air Force Base, California.
So absolutely nothing.
Yeah.
Well, Edwards Air Force Base has Murock Dry Lake on it.
And that's where all the test pilots, if you ever watch the movie The Right Stuff, Panchos, Happy Flying Club is out there at the end of one of the runways.
That's where all the test pilots went.
That's where they got their first astronauts.
So at the time I was a little kid there, I was a brand new graduate of kindergarten out of Las Vegas.
So I went to first and second grade and third grade, I think, at Edwards Air Force Base, where all the test pilots and the astronauts were hanging out.
And I have sat in the X-15, which the astronauts like Neil Armstrong and those kind of guys flew.
That's the one that they would fly that up, right?
And then it would launch from like, what, 30,000 feet or something or 40,000 feet?
Yeah, off of a B-52.
And then it would go up into space and they'd test controls and those kind of things.
And the scene was like Zane and the first man with Ryan Gosling.
I don't know if you saw that movie, but that scene in the very beginning of that movie was just so that's the X-15, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That is the X-15.
So when I was a little kid, my dad was interacting with these people.
So I know I met some of the astronauts, but I don't know exactly.
I don't have that kind of remember which ones.
Right.
But I've sat in their airplanes.
I talked to them when I was a little kid.
And that's where I got the bug to want to fly was there when I was five.
So yeah, it's, you know, we were living that scene in the First Man where they're making sonic booms with the X-15.
We lived that.
My mom lost untold numbers of those little glass sculpture birds that used to buy on the side of the highway.
You're too young to know this, but I think I know what you're talking about.
You would buy them every time, but we were from Tennessee.
So every time my dad would drive us from California or Nevada to Tennessee home for Christmas or anything, we had to stop a couple times and get those glass, some of those glass things, because they were always breaking them when they would break the sound barrier.
The house would shake literally and knock stuff off.
What part of Tennessee are you from?
I lived in Nashville for seven years.
Madison County, Jackson.
It's in between Memphis and Nashville.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Tennessee is a beautiful state.
It is gorgeous.
I went there for college, but people don't, people, when they think about beautiful states, like think of California, maybe Alaska, right?
But people underestimate how, you know, I mean, like in terms of actual landscape, people underestimate how gorgeous Tennessee is.
I mean, I think it even made it into the I Have a Dream speech.
Didn't Martin Luther King say from like the mountains of Tennessee to the hills or whatever?
I can't remember the exact line, but there are a couple of big things.
It's in the Lee Greenwood song.
But when you grow up around people that grew up around people like my grandparents and aunts and uncles, my parents both come from like 12-kid families.
And, you know, they grew up on, they grew up on the real David Crockett and Daniel Boone.
Okay.
Yeah.
And I grew up being around them all the time, even though my dad was in a voltaire.
He made sure he took us home.
And then when he got out, I finished school there in West Tennessee before I went in the Air Force.
So when you're growing up on Daniel Boone and David Crockett and those kind of people, and you see that land, you know, you try.
My manus family came from Robbins, North Carolina, across the land of Tennessee and the Cumberland Gap and all that, the same way Daniel Boone did.
And you see all that land that they crossed and where they settled.
They're in the western part of Tennessee.
And you realize, no wonder this country grew like it did.
It really didn't take politicians to buy land like Jefferson did, the Louisiana purchase and all that, because it was going to happen.
It was going to happen.
And in those days, it's just incredible to listen to people that lived through that and live with those folks.
And I got the opportunity to do that when I was growing up with my great-grandparents and grandparents and those kind of things.
You know, there's nothing like being from the town where Davy Crockett stood and gave his speech on the county courthouse when he got beat in Congress.
He said, the hell with y'all, I'm going to Texas.
I mean, that's where I'm from.
My family's from.
So we're very independent.
We're very, we love this country very much.
And we love the fact that the United States of America is all about freedom and liberty and that it has evolved the way it has.
And all of my family are very upset about what's going on since last summer with all this crazy race crap.
Speaking of Davy Crockett, did you ever join?
Did you ever become a Freemason?
No, but my father, my brothers, my uncle, all are.
I was just too busy in the military.
Oh, man, you're a Lewis.
What's that?
You're a Lewis.
That's the son of a Mason that never becomes a Mason.
That's a nickname.
That's funny because my mother's main name is a Lewis.
There you go.
There you go.
And my uncle, before he passed away a couple of years ago, he was a, I'll make sure I get this right.
He's like above a 33-degree way high out in New Mexico.
I don't know.
But he was, he kind of bugged me a little bit about it.
And then we moved again and I lost track of all that.
So, yeah, I'll probably do that at some point.
It's never too late, man.
But let me know if you need a reference.
Just put my name on the application and they'll call me and I'll tell them you're a good guy.
Now, if I joined the Masons, am I going to be part of that crazy Illuminati thing?
No, that's hogwash baloney.
So the Illuminati was a little bit more than a year.
That's what I wanted to get you.
It was what I wanted to get.
Yeah, it was an Italian.
It was an Italian intellectual club.
And the original founders of the Illuminati were Masons, but it doesn't exist anymore.
The organization.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's all hogwash.
But I thought it was not about working against the freedom in the United States.
No, in fact, they're probably single-handedly responsible, almost single-handedly responsible for the establishment of said freedom.
Absolutely.
That's why George Washington was wearing that apron when he set the cornerstone for the Capitol, William.
That's right.
And well, all the Alamo guys were Masons.
And I recently went to the Alamo and, you know, it was, it was touching because there was like, there's a small sort of subtle plaque from the local lodge there honoring the Masons who fell at the Alamo.
And I didn't realize, but like all those guys, not all of them, but a lot, a lot of the guys that fought at the Alamo were Masons and they were like 26 years old, you know, or 27 or something like that.
So it's just funny because, you know, now today people aren't even really thought of as an adult until they're like 30.
And then, you know, you look back to the Alamo times.
It's sad.
I agree.
But when you look back to the Alamo times, it's like these people are like, you know, giving their lives just for principles, like no personal gain, just for principle at the age of 26, 27, knowing they're going to die, fighting for two weeks.
And it's like, where is that in this generation?
Well, that's another concern.
You know, I'm a big fan of the all-volunteer force.
That's the way we started under General Washington in the United States.
I don't like the draft and any of all that stuff.
So my concern is, is that people like me are, we're no longer recruiting.
You know, the all-volunteer forces filled 75% from former officers and senior enlisted that recruited their family members, friends, and those kind of things.
And I talk to my friends every day.
I'm 59.
And so I have a lot that are older ahead of me in the stream and a lot that are younger, just now retired.
They're not going to recruit anymore until we get some answers and get some action taken on removing people like this General Milley guy who thinks that White Rage was responsible for January 6th when really is about patriotic radicalization in favor of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is what it really was about.
And he needs to get his act together and get his and fire his Bishop Garrison guy who's running his diversity and equity program.
By the way, if you ever hear a term called equity programs in a government institution, fight to get it abolished immediately because equity is not what we're about.
We're about equality of opportunity in this country and not about equality of outcomes because that leads to tyranny, equality of outcomes and government trying to enforce it.
Right.
Yep.
You need the best of the best doing the hardest, most important jobs.
And I'm with you on the drafting.
It seems to me that like, you know, a draft is only needed for foreign and unpopular wars.
Like when would you, when else would you ever need a draft?
Like, you don't need, I know there was a draft for World War II, but everybody was dying to fight that war.
It's like nobody, nobody fought because they were drafted.
You know, it was so dying that they didn't accept World War II.
Right.
Now, World War I, we had to have a draft because nobody wanted to go fight that stupid war.
And it really, if you go look back and do the research on World War I, we really should have never been involved in it, quite frankly.
And I don't know how we got involved, but I know there were a lot of alliances that we needed to honor.
And it was like a chain reaction of secret alliances, wasn't it?
Just the general kind of theory.
Pretty much, yeah.
Well, there were concerns about the same thing you hear from some people in the Republican Party though, today, well, we can't leave Afghanistan.
If we don't fight them over there, we're going to fight them over here again.
Look what they did on 9-11 and those kind of things.
It was the same kind of conversation going on in World War I's lead up.
And so there are a lot of folks that disagreed with World War I. World War II, totally different animal.
You didn't need a draft for that.
Vietnam, terrible decisions leading into that thing.
And we had a draft.
As a matter of fact, that's another plank from what I've run on as a political candidate.
And that is to eliminate the selective service.
We spent too much money on it.
We get now into arguments like what you're starting to see again is, well, women need to sign up for it and those kind of things.
Well, let's just resolve the problem.
Some people have issues with that.
Some people don't.
But let's just resolve it.
Let's eliminate the selective service and save that money and maybe like put that into programs for improving literacy amongst poor kids.
And I don't just mean poor kids.
Imagine if there's a civil war and you got drafted by the federal government to fight against American citizens.
Well, that's a whole that's a whole different ballgame.
That's a whole different ballgame.
And you know, you'll hear me say that it might be coming, but you won't hear me advocate for that.
We killed 600,000 plus Americans in that war.
It's the bloodiest war we've ever fought in.
And none of us that have served that are especially on the right, like Kurt Schlichter's or retired colonel, myself.
He's been on the show.
He's awesome.
We talk about, we warn people that this is coming.
You know, it gets back to that patriotic radicalization idea that I was talking about.
This is kind of, we don't want this to happen.
But eventually, if you don't stop doing what you're doing, this will happen.
I mean, we've studied this stuff.
We've spent our lives devoted to studying this stuff in the hopes of preventing those kinds of things.
And but folks aren't, they don't tend to be listening on either side of the aisle.
And they better start.
They better start.
So the last thing I want to ask you about before we depart, because we're coming up on an hour and I want to be respectful of your time, is what do you think about all the reports that have been released about UAPs?
About what?
UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.
Well, you know, I don't know.
Have you ever seen anything like that when you were in the Air Force?
I don't know if you ever got this from my bio, but I was the commander of Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.
Roswell Air Force Base was south of that several hundred miles.
It's closed.
You know what Roswell is, right?
Where the spacecraft crash was and the little aliens, right?
According to the stories.
Yeah, the weather or whatever.
Yeah.
Well, I was called the 21st century version of the Roswell commander at my base there.
And I would do these town halls with the communities downtown.
There was always this one lady that lived outside of the fence.
We had several mountain ranges on the base and the fence line had houses, subdivisions outside of the fence.
Every time I had a town hall, she would come talk to me about the silver footprints she was seeing at night going up the mountain.
You know what?
I'm not going to say that the folks that have seen that took the HUD video, the heads-up display video from their aircraft are wrong.
I'm just going to say that we see strange stuff when we're flying around the world at all hours of the day and night.
And those are some strange, some of the strangest things I've ever seen.
I've seen some of the videos, but I flew for 25 years.
And before that, I was in bomb disposal as a young kid.
So almost 33 years of military service and 25 of it flying.
And believe me, I've flown all over the world, pole to pole, all the way around at the middle, all hours of the day or night.
And I can honestly say I never saw a UFO or UAV, whatever you guys, UVAs.
What do you call them now?
I think that political routine is a UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena.
Phenomenon.
Yeah, that's it.
They're UFOs.
Go back and read Project Blue Book if you haven't ever read it.
That's the Air Force project from the 1950s.
There's actually a TV show about it, I think, which was true to the book.
They took the reports right out of Project Blue Book on that television show.
And of course, it's always art stuff, but you can watch those programs and get an idea that some people have seen some things that are very strange and they're not identifiable.
But I tell you, if we had them and we had that technology, I wasn't aware of it.
And I was in the highest security classified programs that you could think about.
Well, do you think a lot of this stuff is perhaps foreign tech that we don't know what it is?
And it's just stuff that we see.
Well, we have a lot of things that you don't know about.
Yeah.
So it could be definitely suit.
Yeah, that's one.
And you have to, and that means that we also have a lot of things that I don't know about.
Even if I was flying, yeah, we have things that I don't know about.
We have things that those Navy pilots with that heads-up display activity don't know about.
So there's a possibility that there's any one of those things.
But quite frankly, how can we not have neighbors somewhere in the universe?
Sure.
Sure.
I mean, come on.
Think about it.
It's got to be too many opportunities.
Yeah, yeah.
So I'm not going to poo-poo the idea, so to speak.
But I personally have not seen anything.
And I can't really talk about the silver footprints out at Albuquerque into my mountain cave complex.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Where can people find you?
You can find me at Rob Manus on Twitter, R-O-B-M-A-N-E-S-S.
Go to my fan page on Facebook.
It's at Symbol, C-O-L, Rob Manus.
You can find me on Gab, Getter, Parlor, still there, but it's not very good, I don't think.
But Getter's actually been pretty good.
And that's all at Rob Manus.
If you type in at Symbol Rob Manus on any of those platforms, I'll come up Telegram.
Awesome.
Well, thank you, Sarah.
It was a pleasure to have you and honor to meet you.
Thank you for your service and for coming on the show.
And let's make an effort to stay in touch.
Oh, yeah, Chase.
I'll have to get you on my show here anytime this fall, this coming fall before Christmas.
